Transformation and Stasis: Two Case Studies of Critical Teacher Education in TESOL

Abstract

Considering the prominent position of critical work in TESOL and Applied Linguistics, there is a need for detailed investigations of apprentice practitioners' formative interactions with critical ideas in graduate programs and how these affect their willingness to cultivate their own critical pedagogical repertories. Adopting a case study design, this study examines 1) the factors that may have structured two novices' situated understandings of criticality as it was constructed in a graduate TESOL course and 2) how extensively they came to incorporate critical principles into their burgeoning pedagogical philosophies. Results indicate that divergent outcomes of critical teacher education were attributable to disparities in student habitus and opportunities for praxis development more so than experiences of enduring oppression. In order to counteract the marginalization of novices who struggle to adopt vocal and disputative critical personas, the study recommends the use of simulated teaching activities and written reflective tasks in various textual genres.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Gloria Park, David Hanauer, Ryuko Kubota, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this text.

Notes

¹ All participants are referred to by pseudonyms of their own choosing.

² The course number and title have been changed.

³ TESOL 500 met once a week, with each session lasting 2.5 hours. In total, I observed 15 class sessions.

⁴ Though our observations were anecdotal, Dr. Sohn and I both felt that the American students and one Saudi man tended to dominate class proceedings, particularly during early sessions.

⁵ I was able to note how disparities in linguistic capital applied to written discourse because participants voluntarily allowed me to peruse their course assignments in a nonevaluative manner. However, I did not consider these documents an official data source in my study.

⁶ For example, in addition to the interview comments detailed above, Mei's postinstruction concept map referenced decontextualized teaching methods such as “read after teacher or do [jigsaw] reading” and “reading and answering questions” without grounding the advocated techniques in any broader epistemology, critical or otherwise.